Cocaine

There was a big frosted window, a desk with some opened newspapers, some sheets of paper in disarray, a long pair of scissors lying wide open, an ink stand, a bottle of glue, a lamp, an ashtray with a great many wax match heads which looked like tiny skulls mingled with small bones in a dainty charnel-house (there were still some traces of cocaine in Tito’s head), a telephone, some newspaper cuttings stuck to a wall, and a thin shelf with a few books lying about on it. It looked not so much as if the shelf were there for the books but as if the books had been put there for the sake of the shelf.

  “Your office is exactly the same,” Pietro Nocera explained. “They’re all exactly alike, like cabins in a liner.”

  Someone knocked the door, and a messenger came in.

  “Show her up,” Pietro said to the messenger. Then, turning to Tito, he added “It’s a temporary mistress of mine. Go next door and take possession of your office. I’ll fetch you in an hour’s time.”

  “Do you mean you receive women in your office?”

  “Where do you expect me to receive them, you provincial? In yours?”

  Tito walked out. The woman walked in.

  3

  There’s a kind of freemasonry among cocaine addicts. They recognize one another by signs perceptible only to themselves; they have their own lodges, some more democratic, others more aristocratic — but that is of no consequence, because they drift from one to the other, from the cabarets of Montmartre to the villas of the Porte Maillot, from the boîtes à étudiants of the Latin Quarter to the cafés of Montparnasse. In a few months Tito Arnaudi got to know all the legendary cafés, the little theaters of the Butte Sacée, the dives that re-echo to the sound of brass instruments beating out the rhythm of licentious dances from five o’clock in the evening until dawn. He went to all these semi-tolerated, semi-clandestine nightspots which are the meeting places of the cocaine addicts who form fifty per cent of their habitués. He got to know the small world that gathers round the university: the little women who from the age of fifteen to thirty-five practice the romantic profession of student’s girlfriend. They are very undemanding girlfriends, satisfied with half a room, half a bed and one meal a day; they attach themselves to a student because of the sentimental caprice of an hour. The hour passes, the caprice remains, is extended and transformed, and in the meantime a year passes, two years pass, and so does the bloom of youth. The girlfriend remains, almost faithful, almost in love, and then the young man takes his degree and leaves her; and she weeps, perhaps seriously, she feels desperate, perhaps genuinely, and for consolation finds another young man, younger than the one who left her and younger than she herself. She accompanies him, supervising all his actions, both sensible and crazy, throughout his university career, in all the rented rooms he lives in, rooms new to him but not to her, to all the cafés where they play snooker and backgammon, to all the numerous Bouillons Chartier, where for five francs they have the complete illusion of having lunch for two.

  And one day, out of bravado, a student of pharmacy offers his friend some white powder to which he has helped himself in the university lab; and the latter accepts it, for fun, or to be in the swim, and not for pleasure, because the first pinch is always unpleasant; and then he can no longer do without it, and with a clouded mind he begins the descent through all the stages of degradation to complete destitution. And the female companion, who has followed him through the various rented rooms, bars and bouillons starts taking it too, smiling as she did the first time she used a powder puff, and then . . .

  And then these little women draw close to one another, meet, need, recognize and understand one another. You see them in twos and threes in the bars at apéritif time, behaving restlessly, sniffing all round them like fox terriers, going in twos and threes to the toilet or to telephone booths and emerging a few minutes later with eyes more shining, faces more serene, movements more vivacious, looking more cheerful, more talkative, more attractive. In the toilet or telephone booth they have exchanged cocaine.

  They are still at the first stage of addiction. They still have some restraint; they confess their vice only if they are sure that their confidante is a renifleuse too. They still take the poison secretly, shyly, shamefully. In a few months’ time they will be putting the little box on the café table as ostentatiously as if it were a cigarette case with a ducal coronet.

  There is a cold, dead look in their eyes; what has died is their will.

  But of what use would it be if it still existed? Could it make them give up the drug? No, because it has become a necessity. It is not being deprived of it, but the mere possibility of being deprived of it that disturbs, upsets and exasperates them. They take your hand and press it against their heart, where a tiny breast serves as a sounding box.

  “Feel how hard, how quickly, it beats,” they say. “It slows down and seems to stop, and then it starts up again.”

  At night, they say, they have dreadful shivering fits; they suffer from sleeplessness. Not having the drug is appalling, but the idea of not being able to get it is even more appalling.

  And then they resort to the most disastrous expedients to get it, though they rarely resort to serious crime, for which energy is needed. They begin by cutting out unnecessary expenditure, and then they cut out necessary expenditure. They exchange their flat for a furnished room, and they exchange the latter for a garret. They sell their furs and jewels at ridiculous prices; and then they sell their clothes, and then their body. And they go on until they are so raddled that no more buyers are to be found. Their coquettishness goes, and so does their sense of cleanliness, though in that environment coquettishness and cleanliness are necessary for survival. And that is why it is possible to meet women, now modestly or poorly dressed, who a few months before were leaders of fashion at Auteuil and Longchamp.

  “And your fur coat?”

  “Fifty grams of coco.”

  “And the gold bracelets?”

  “A box as big as that, full of nothing but bicarbonate of soda and phenacetin.”

  And the woman laughs coldly, in order not to weep, in order not to try to weep, perhaps because she would no longer know how to. Among these creatures who are half women and half ghosts the peddler circulates with his little cardboard boxes with labels of various colors: red, green or yellow, each color secretly indicating a more or less dishonest mixture. He never sells pure cocaine, which is always only a small proportion of the mixture; all the rest is boric acid or lactose or magnesium carbonate.

  The peddler knows that an addict can be satisfied with a white powder that looks only roughly like cocaine; so long as she has something to sniff she does not analyze it. In the final stages of addiction she can’t distinguish cocaine from sugar, and in the early stages she is less interested in the drug than in the ceremonial of taking it. With a gold nib? An ivory nail file? A tiny bone spoon taken from a saltcellar? The nail of a little finger grown specially long for the purpose?

  So the dealer grows rich in a few months. With 100 grams of cocaine he buys 10,000 lire worth of jewelry, and when his customers offer him the empty boxes he buys them back at the rate of one sou for every ten sous’ worth.

  The editor of The Fleeting Moment was quick to appreciate Tito’s talents. In fact he telephoned the manager after the first week, and when Tito presented himself to draw his salary he was handed 500 francs extra.

  “What’s the meaning of this?” he asked the editor.

  “It means you’re a bright young man.”

  “You never told me so.”

  “I don’t tell you, I show it.”

  He showed him the greatest consideration, and excused him from all the boring jobs.

  “Would you like to go and report this conference?”

  “No,” said Tito.

  “Why not?”

  “Because it doesn’t amuse me. Conferences are assemblies of people who argue about how to conduct an argument and end by sending a telegram of congratulation to the minister.”

  “You’re perfe
ctly right,” the editor said. “I’ll send one of your colleagues.”

  The chief sub-editor too realized that Tito was a decent fellow, and suggested that they should address each other in the familiar second person singular.

  The chief sub-editor was not an important person on the newspaper, though his title suggested high rank in the journalistic hierarchy; actually he was an excellent fellow subordinate to everyone else. Our society creates these comforting paradoxes. The horse, after being worked and exploited like the lowest proletarian, is called the noble animal. Deformation of the spine, hypertrophy of the bones, cretinism, physical monstrosities are cheerfully called “sports” of nature; sick people are sent to health centers; places where people are sent to die are called sanatoria; and priests, after being condemned to childlessness and celibacy, are called “father.”

  Pietro Nocera, his Italian friend, did everything he could to help Tito during his first months on the newspaper and guided his footsteps in all the different aspects of the job.

  “But soon you’ll turn your back on me,” Tito told him. “As long as I’m junior to you in position and pay, you’ll help and protect me and tell your colleagues that I have talent; but salary’s a rough guide to one’s value, and as soon as my pay is the same as yours you’ll say I’m an idiot. That’s perfectly human and natural. Even the Almighty, after giving Adam a good position in the earthly paradise, thought better of it and promptly found a pretext to ruin him.”

  “You’ve been taking cocaine again,” Pietro Nocera said in tones of mild reproach. “When you make biblical comparisons it means that you have a few grams of cocaine up your nose.”

  “Don’t change the subject,” Tito replied. “I tell you, you’ll drop me.”

  “No, my friend,” Pietro Nocera went on, leaning against the back of a soft divan at the Café Richelieu. “You haven’t yet realized that I don’t have the stupid little defects of other men. I envy neither you, nor the editor, nor the President of the Republic, nor Félix Potin, who is the leading pork butcher in Paris. I work because I need to have two thousand francs in my pocket every month, but I have no desire to glorify work either by enthusiasm or envy or emulation. Life is a mere waiting room in which we spend time before entering into the void. Who would think of working in a waiting room? While awaiting our turn we chat, or look at the pictures on the walls. But work? There’s no point in it, if when our turn comes to go into the next room we shall no longer see anything. I don’t understand why all these people get excited and upset and argue. One man acts the hero, another rouses the multitude, a third brags and blusters; one man expounds ideas, another demolishes systems, a third stands values on their head. And what for? When you consider that today’s triumphant victor who holds the mob in the hollow of his hand tomorrow goes into a café, drinks from a badly washed glass, swallows two or three germs no bigger than one thousandth of a millimeter, and then goes back to his creator. But coming back to you, if one day I were to tell someone that you were an idiot, it would mean I thought others intelligent. Instead I see all round me nothing but people who pretend to be different from what they are, propound ideas they do not have, make a display of beliefs that are not theirs, engage in fine gestures and fine phrases to conceal some deficiency or inferiority. A man who doesn’t wear an overcoat in winter on the ground that he’s healthier without one would wear a fine fur coat in bed if he had one; nine times out of ten the recluse, the misanthrope, is someone whom no one wants to visit; the man who systematically practices taciturnity and tries to give the impression of profound thought and philosophic doubt is not an intellectual crucified by skepticism but a puppet with a windy void in his head. If someone tells me he’s sick of everything and is disgusted with the world and tired of life and that the only happiness lies in death, I’m prepared to believe him only after he has shot himself and been buried. But so long as there isn’t a cubic meter of earth on his belly I shall go on believing that he’s play-acting . . .”

  While Pietro Nocera talked Tito looked through the café windows at the crowded boulevard outside. A policeman armed with a white truncheon was regulating the car and pedestrian traffic against a confused background of unintelligible voices and other noises.

  He told me all this the first time we met, Tito said to himself. A man tells you the most interesting things he knows during the first half hour he talks to you; after that he either repeats himself or offers you variations on the same theme.

  “What are you thinking about?” Pietro asked.

  “I’m thinking that you’re a real friend,” Tito replied. “But there’s no sign of the chief sub-editor. Do you suppose he has forgotten?”

  And, just as happens in plays, Tito was just saying “He won’t be coming” when the person referred to walked in.

  The chief sub-editor was one of those kindly persons who offer invaluable advice when you have something in your eye (blow your nose, look up, walk backwards, find the square root — etc.).

  He was forty, which is the most frightening age in life. You don’t feel sorry for the old, because they are old already; you don’t feel sorry for the dead, because they are dead already. But you do feel sorry for those approaching old age, those approaching death. Forty! At fairgrounds you see rollercoasters dashing up a steep slope followed by a steep drop and then another ascent. At the top of the slope, or rather just before the top, the vehicle has used up all the energy acquired in the descent and it slows down and hesitates as if the top were unattainable, as if it were terrified of the approaching plunge. The man approaching forty is in a similar state of hesitation and uncertainty; his pace slackens, he is paralyzed by the approaching summit and the descent he cannot see but knows lies just ahead.

  The chief sub-editor was forty.

  “I detest tabarins,” he said, emptying his fourth glass of cognac. “All those people who dance in basements to harrow each other’s nerve endings and think they’re enjoying themselves don’t realize in their frenzy that they are passive instruments in the hands of nature, which provides them with the excitement of the dance in the interests of the reproduction of the species.”

  He emptied another glass.

  “I laugh out of politeness,” he went on a little later. “I laugh to try and hide my melancholy. And, as I don’t succeed in hiding it either from myself or from others, I drink, to hide it at any rate from myself. I drink to get rid of my mental wrinkles, but they can’t be got rid of, they can only be smoothed out for a moment, like the lines that women smooth out with facial massage. For a short time they vanish, and then they come back deeper than ever.”

  He drank again.

  “As a result of spending a lifetime in newspaper composing rooms I’ve got used to reading upside down, to seeing things the wrong way up. It’s a sad gift. Thanks to it I lost confidence in the loyalty of a friend who was dear to me, and I discovered that the woman who pretended to love me despised and betrayed me.

  “So now I drink.

  “I drink, and drink will be my ruin. I know it, but it helps me to see things through rose-tinted spectacles, and that’s enough for me. And then when I look at the world I see it as the optimists paint it.”

  “And when you haven’t been drinking?” Tito asked.

  “When I haven’t been drinking . . . Permit me a slight digression. When believers, mystics, look at the world, they don’t see beautiful, provocative women or pleasure-loving men; they see skeletons, skulls with empty eye-sockets, jaws without tongues, teeth without gums, shamefully bald heads, feet that seem to be made of imperfect dice, long hands that look like the mouthpieces of pipes strung together. But when I look at mankind I see spinal columns, spinal cords and nerves branching out from them.”

  “So much for men,” said Tito. “And what about women?”

  “Women? Roving uteri. That’s all. I see roving uteri and men pursuing them, hypnotized, talking confusedly of glory, ideals, humanity. And so I drink.”

  Through the steamed up window
s two dense and continuous streams of people were to be seen. The sound of their voices, the brouhaha, the trampling of feet, the movements of the crowd, suggested a color — bitumen mixed with a uniform grayish yellow, against which the occasional cry of a hawker, the loud laughter of a street Arab or a woman’s shrill voice stood out like splashes of red, blobs of white, daubs of violet, parabolas of silver, jets of lilac, quivers of green, hieroglyphics of yellow, arrows of blue. The agile, springy legs of women contrasted with the leaden monotony, all of them long, slender, muscular, pink and wrapped in their silk stockings as if by a spiral of thread that wound round their thighs and calves like the grooves of gramophone records.

  The modern Venus no longer has the soft, plump gracefulness that our grandfathers sought for (with their hands); the contemporary Venus reminds one of the androgynous girl in a troupe of British gymnasts.

  “And so I drink,” said the man who smiled out of politeness. “Love might perhaps be left to me, but I’ve at last realized what love is. It’s a sweet poison that comes to me from a woman I like. After some time all the poison I’ve absorbed makes me immune, and then the poison that continues to come to me from her no longer affects me.

  “Once upon a time I still had the stimulus of being faced with rivals, and I tried to fight them, but now that I’m chief sub-editor, now that I’ve ‘arrived,’ I’m also finished. I’ve lost the joy of struggle, chiefly because I have no more enemies, but also because if I had I would not take the trouble to fight them. I’ve come to see that competitors are necessary to those who want to get on in the world. Opposition is indispensable to success. We should have realized that elementary truth from the embryonic beginnings of life; spermatozoa have to swim upstream to reach the ovary.”

  “That’s a paradox,” said Tito.

  “I never state paradoxes, because generally they are nothing but cleverly presented absurdities,” the chief sub-editor replied. “I claim that enemies are extremely useful when you know how to handle them properly. In medicine, as you know better than I do, germs are used to fight the illnesses that they cause, are they not? The whole of serotherapy is based on the exploitation of our enemies to our own advantage. Isn’t the leech a parasite of man? Well, in a doctor’s hands it’s a very useful thing. Enmity is a force, a negative, contrary force, but it’s still a force, and all forces are exploitable by man to his own advantage. What do you think?”